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Backgrounder: Bush's Plan to Secure Baghdad

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Lionel Beehner, Staff Writer
January 18, 2007

Introduction

At the heart of President Bush's new stabilization plan on Iraq is securing Baghdad. A large percentage of the additional 17,500 U.S. forces going to the capital will be deployed to protect the local population. Unlike previous efforts to secure Baghdad, the plan calls for more American soldiers to be embedded with Iraqi forces, to remain in cleared areas around the clock, and to be given greater freedom to take on Shiite militias as well as Sunni insurgents. Once security is established, the U.S. military will then focus on economic reconstruction and handing security operations over to the Iraqi authorities.

What are the specifics of the Baghdad plan?

The plan relies on U.S. soldiers, working with their Iraqi counterparts, to establish a stronger physical presence in neighborhoods rife with violence. Unlike previous missions, analysts say, the nature of the plan is more defensive than offensive: to help Iraqi forces secure Baghdad's population, not kill large numbers of insurgents. Some specifics of the plan:

• The number of U.S. forces in Baghdad, currently twenty-four thousand, will be initially boosted to thirty-one thousand—an addition of two brigades. There are also three additional brigades (roughly ten thousand troops) that could be "put in the pipeline on the U.S. side that are on orders to go," according to the congressional testimony of Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.


• U.S. forces will be scattered throughout Baghdad's nine zones, each of which will be patrolled by one Iraqi police or army brigade and one American battalion (roughly 600 soldiers divided into four companies of 150 each). The number of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad will eventually grow from forty-two thousand to fifty thousand.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.